Succeeding in UK with the Bank-focused Model of Mobile Banking

By Shekhar Kapoor

Succeeding in UK with the Bank-focused Model of Mobile Banking

There are several indications that mobile banking is making a comeback in the United Kingdom. Interested participants including financial institutions, telecom operators and other service providers have entered the market through a variety of arrangements. This paper examines the bank-focused mobile banking model, its challenges and opportunities.

As per the Mobile Marketing Association, 1 in 7 Adult britons banked using their mobile phone in 2009. It also indicated that young consumers in the age group of 18-34 are most likely to use mobile banking. From a Financial Institutions' prespective,it presents an excellent opportunity where the young population is becoming an early adopter.

Various research surveys by mobile money specialist Monitise revealed that the U.K. mobile banking industry was growing at 30% per annum, outpacing credit cards, ATMs and online banking in mass market penetration. A large majority of U.K customers now have access to mobile banking offerings and are making good use of the facility, to perform more sophisticated transactions, more frequently.

The growth of mobile remittances has been equally spectacular and is forecasted to touch £6 billion by 2012, largely riding on the demand from a growing immigrant community. The community shares a special bond with the device as it can be used to stay in touch with relatives and friends as well as transfer money on regular basis. The success of a leading financial institution tie up for NFC-based contactless payments at terminals is testimony to its popularity; already, over 8,000 retailers have equipped themselves to accept mobile-based contactless payments based on this system

Much of this growth can be attributed to the availability of smart phones and other 3G enabled handsets as well the development of high speed 3G data networks that together enabled the delivery of a secure, smooth and rich user experience. To illustrate, a leading U.K. financial institution launched a free iPhone application for its mobile banking users after research indicated that 1 in 4 wanted to transfer money, receive fraud alerts or deposit a cheque using their phone.

Different Approaches to Mobile Banking

Financial institutions in the U.K. are deploying different modes of mobile banking, from simple SMS to secure downloadable applications, to attract customers. Although still in its infancy, the mobile banking landscape is dotted with a variety of players from the financial services, telecom and handset space which have established their presence by adopting one of the following business models:

Bank-focused model wherein a financial institution provides a banking service to its customers over a self-service channel such as the mobile phone. For instance, Barclays' .mobi domain online banking service provides a customised online banking user interface that allows customers to access the Barclays internet banking site over mobile web. Interestingly, the use of a .mobi domain makes for better branding of mobile banking, since customers immediately recognise that the site has been optimised for mobile access and is therefore likely to provide a superior experience.

Bank-led collaboration model which enables a bank to reach out to a wider audience by allying with other participants in the mobile banking value chain, such as mobile network operators, money transfer agencies and handset companies. An example of this model is Monilink, a joint venture between technology firms, financial institutions and telecom providers offering a common mobile banking platform.

Non-bank-led model wherein the financial institution might just hold the funds in a transaction or not be involved at all. An example of this is Payforit, a payment system launched jointly by mobile operators Orange, Vodafone, T6 mobile and O2 that allows subscribers to make small value purchases using their mobile phone and pay for them out of prepaid credit or along with their monthly phone bill.

Challenges facing the bank-focused model

Financial institutions keen on taking a share in the U.K. mobile banking segment must keep pace with its evolution and meet its challenges before mining its opportunities. The bank- focused model, in particular, has the following challenges to be addressed, both from the users' and institutions' viewpoint:

Primary concerns of mobile banking customers

How is the customer experience? Customers look for an easy-to-use interface that they can navigate intuitively. Indeed, research studies have highlighted that a poor prior experience on the mobile web makes users reluctant to visit the site(s) in question again. Sub-optimal layout and display are strong causes for dissatisfaction. A large U.K. bank learnt this lesson the hard way, having to redesign its mobile banking site more than once before it received the approval of its users. Thankfully, the effort paid off in terms of improved adoption rate and brand equity. Hence, while introducing a mobile banking offering, banks must pay close attention to the quality of user experience.

How secure is the network? The bugbear of online transactions - risk of identity, data or financial theft pose challenges in mobile banking adoption. While certain financial institutions have tried to address these fears by integrating best in class partner solutions dealing with security free of cost, the measures are inadequate, providing defense against malware and viruses on the mobile web and for mobile phone identity management, but nothing by way of protection against phishing, pharming and other sophisticated forms of identity fraud. The need of the hour is to provide total security through strong multi-factor authentication coupled with robust fraud detection and analysis. Banks can collaborate with top of the line security technology vendors to ensure adequate and uninterrupted safety of their customers' transactions.

Is service readily available and reliable? Customers should be able to access the service from any part of the world on a 24/7 basis, 365 days a year. In order to achieve the desired performance levels, financial institutions can tie up with aggregators (payment/sms)/technology companies providing almost 99.9% uptime with minimum latency across geographies.

Can customers personalize the service? The facility to personalize mobile banking usage significantly improves customer experience. While the option to set favorite accounts adds to customers' convenience, being able to receive an instant payment or transaction alert enhances confidence. The technical capability required to enable personalization can be easily acquired by partnering with mobile technology companies.

Primary issues faced by financial institutions:

What is the level of technical expertise required? Mobile banking applications use Java or .Net frameworks that run on top of a variety of operating systems such as iPhone OS, Symbian, Android and Windows Mobile. Since financial institutions lack the technical expertise to build, manage and support an online banking framework on their own, they must rely on the capabilities of a trusted mobile technology partner that can ensure uninterrupted delivery of the mobile banking service as well as crunch the time required to market new offerings.

What is scalability of the service ? Having the capability to serve existing customers is not enough; banks must be prepared to cater to an ever-growing base of mobile banking users comprising their own and their competitor banks' customers. Performance and uninterrupted availability of the service under severe loading conditions are equally important. By partnering with mobile phone and network companies, financial institutions can extend their scale of operations by acquiring new customers, just as Monitise has done through their tie up with Carphone Warehouse to provide “pre-seed” mobile currency and banking software on the new handsets of the latter's customers.

How attractive is the value proposition? A report by a leading mobile network operator suggested that customers in the U.K. did not feel the need for mobile banking given the extensive ATM network in that country. And although there is acceptance of mobile banking as another channel, it appears that that is a result of marketing push rather than demand pull. Banks must convince customers about the attractiveness of this channel by clearly communicating its benefits and formulating supportive market strategies.

What is the cost of service? Establishing a full-fledged in-house mobile banking service in all its forms requires investment in human resources, technology etc. In the current scenario, majority of financial institutions are resorting to cost cutting as a means to achieve operational excellence and corporate sustainability. Since investing in an in-house service might turn out to be a risky proposition for the inexperienced, banks should take the judicious option of partnering with mobile technology companies.

Where is the regulation? At present, the mobile banking market is largely ungoverned, although that may change in future. Under current conditions, it is hard for financial organizations to envision a structured approach towards setting up an in-house banking service all by themselves. Hence, it makes better sense to partner with existing mobile technology vendors and network carriers to ensure that a standardized service is delivered.

The Double-edged Sword of Customer Empowerment

Today, banks across the world offer online financial planning tools to empower customers to take better financial decisions independently. In the U.K., the provision of such a facility resonates with market need – a survey by U.K.'s largest retail bank found that half of adult mobile users wished to track their accounts, a similar number were interested in transferring money and about one-third believed that mobile banking would be useful in financial planning. This insight is consistent with the higher usage of comparator tools among banking customers in the U.K. compared to other European markets.

The demand for financial planning tools has created a flurry of parallel offerings from third-party sites such as mint.com.

While customer empowerment is a laudable idea in principle, it carries the risk of incorrect decision making, especially in the hands of inexperienced users. Therefore, it is prudent that banks continue to perform an advisory role in the financial planning process to ensure better results for their customers and greater loyalty and brand equity for themselves.

Summary

After a tepid first attempt, mobile banking is making a strong re-entry in the U.K., largely driven by the burgeoning handset and 3G market and the demand for mobile remittances. Statistics on internet usage, mobile banking adoption and the growth of online remittances point to the market's acceptance of this medium as a high convenience-low cost transaction option. Various players, financial and otherwise, have moved in on the opportunity with a slew of mobile banking, transaction and payment offerings. Some banks have chosen to go it alone whereas others have collaborated with technology and telecom companies to put forth a joint offering. That being said, U.K.'s mobile banking is still in its infancy, and both incumbent and new players can gain much by taking judicious action such as devising future implementation strategies and identifying potential partners as soon as possible.

In particular, practitioners of the bank-focused mobile banking business model must anticipate challenges and launch a timely remedial response. To start with, they must address their mobile banking customers' concerns regarding ease of use and security. Besides these, the banks themselves may have constraints of technology, scalability and budgets. Many companies in the U.K have circumvented these problems by allying with the right technology vendors, and in the bargain acquired new customers, gained technical expertise and improved regulatory compliance.

The future success of participants in the value chain hinges on their ability to keep pace with demand, overcome challenges and take advantage of new opportunities such as mobile remittances, contactless payments and financial planning.

The author is a consultant for Product Strategy at Fiancle. Infosys Technologies

Sharing Info: Cameron: The first iPM?Rory Cellan-Jones | 09:44 U...

Sharing Info: Cameron: The first iPM?Rory Cellan-Jones | 09:44 U...: "Cameron: The first iPM?Rory Cellan-Jones | 09:44 UK time, Tuesday, 13 July 2010The man standing on a step in his back garden seemed passiona..."

Cameron: The first iPM?

Rory Cellan-Jones | 09:44 UK time, Tuesday, 13 July 2010

The man standing on a step in his back garden seemed passionate about the internet and what it could do for his country. Addressing a collection of chief executives, some civil servants and a scattering of new web users, he promised to give Britain the fastest, best broadband network in the world.

So is David Cameron the first prime minister who really gets the internet? Or was he, to quote a former Conservative PM, "inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity" when meeting so many digital types in one place?

The event in the Downing Street garden was the launch of Martha Lane Fox's Manifesto for a Networked Nation with its audacious promise to get the whole of the UK workforce online by the time Mr Cameron has to face the electorate again.

First, the PM met several members of Ms Lane Fox's Digital Task Force, people who've learned to use the internet in recent years. They sat around the cabinet table telling him their inspiring stories. People like Emilyn Hutchinson, who started using a computer at a shelter for the homeless when she was 17 and is now studying for a degree, or Jackie Seer, who set up an online community support network for people living on her estate in West London.

Then his techie credentials were burnished by his Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt who told the guests that the PM was the proud owner not only of a blackberry but an Apple iPad - Mr Cameron later confirmed that he sits surfing on the iPad via a wireless network in his Downing Street flat, while watching television. But even Mr Hunt may have been a little taken aback by his boss's subsequent promise to take Britain right to the top of the world broadband league.

The government's recent pledge to deliver the fastest broadband in Europe - which I compared to taking West Ham to the top of the Premiership in five years - already looked a bit of a stretch. Now, apparently we are going to go speeding past South Korea -according to a recent speech by Jeremy Hunt, the UK is currently ranked 33rd in the world when it comes to broadband speed, with an average that is nearly five times slower than that in South Korea.

This Thursday the culture secretary has summoned Britain's major telecoms businesses to an event where they will thrash Britain's broadband future. On the agenda are two pressing matters - first, delivering the minimum 2Mbps coverage promised across the country by 2012, then working out how to build a next-generation network of super-fast broadband which will reach the third of the country that the market will probably ignore.

The broadband suppliers are already sucking their teeth about the cost of laying fibre to every farm - and warning ministers that it will cost more than the few hundred million pounds that they have budgeted. Now it seems the PM wants them to show that Britain can be a world champion.

I have just done a quick search through the BBC web archive and came up with this article from 10 years ago. The prime minister then said he wanted the entire population using the web by 2005, promised that Britain would lead the world in e-commerce, and that all government services would be delivered online.

Now David Cameron does seem a lot more at ease with technology than Tony Blair ever did. But before we decide that he's our first iPM, let's see where we stand in the world broadband league a few years from now.

How Alan Turing's Pilot ACE changed computing

An employee at the Science Museum, London, stands in front of the Pilot ACE, a pre-cursor to Alan Turing's famous Automatic Computing Engine

DIGITAL PLANET BBC World Service

On 10 January 1954, a de Havilland Comet - the world's first commercial jet airliner - took off from Rome.

After only just 20 minutes in flight, it broke apart, killing all 35 people on board.

Months later there was another disaster, this time a Comet crashed near Naples during a flight between Rome and Cairo.

The two crashes in such short succession prompted an investigation.

Fatigued failure

It was eventually discovered, through a series of tests, that metal fatigue had been the cause of both accidents.

Testing had been carried out by building a replica aircraft in a tank of water before exposing it to high pressures - similar to the conditions it would experience in mid-air.

This required carrying out some intricate calculations - a task perfect for the Pilot ACE, the predecessor to English computer scientist Alan Turing's computer, the ACE.

Tom Vickers was operations manager for the Pilot ACE. For BBC World Service's Digital Planet programme, he was interviewed by his granddaughter, Harriet, about the early days of the machine - and of computing in the UK.

"The idea of computers developed during the war, in America, and also at Bletchley where they did build special purpose computers for code-cracking.

"One of the key people there was Alan Turing, who was to design an electronic computer.

"He started off on his own, and I was encouraged to join. And so, the ideas of electronic computers developed."

Although work on the machine started in 1946, it was not until 1950 that the Pilot ACE ran its first programme.

By this point, Turing had left the project as he was, Mr Vickers says, frustrated by the speed of progress.

However, the ideas he had left behind were enough to get the project going.

"This led to the development of a machine called the Pilot ACE which would act as a starter for the full scale machine that Turing had envisaged."

Calculations for custom

After showing that the machine could be used to solve practical problems, the Pilot ACE went into public production.

Based at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, one of its first customers, the Royal Aircraft Establishment, was quick to use it when running tests on the metal-fatigued Comet airliners to see where the metal would crack.

"This led to an enormous amount of calculation and masses of data were collected."

Another early, loyal user of the Pilot ACE was Ordnance Survey which used it to analyse photographs used for creating maps.

"You got an aeroplane, it flew over the country, it took a load of photographs," Mr Vickers explained.

"You then analysed the photographs and could then make the maps.

"This was quite a lengthy process. Analysing one photo used to take them about a day," he said. "A good day's flying would keep you busy for many a month."

But by using the Pilot ACE, this time-consuming task was cut down to size.

"We got the calculations side down to about one minute. From their point of view it was fantastic."

As well as being useful, the Pilot ACE was highly profitable.

For the first two or three years of their mass-production, each machine was, Mr Vickers recalls, making upwards of £30 per hour.

In an era when highly respected scientists predicted that the UK could solve its computing needs with just three machines in the entire country, the Pilot ACE showed real potential of powerful computing.

Ecstasy 'may help trauma victims'

Ecstasy may help boost therapy success in patients with post-traumatic stress disorder, say researchers.

A small trial in 20 patients has shown use of the drug is safe and seems to improve the effects of psychotherapy.

The US team has now gained approval for a larger study in military veterans, but stresses more research is needed to confirm the finding.

It is thought the drug reduces fear enabling patients to get more out of their therapy sessions.

Writing in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, the team said patients were selected on a strict criteria - they had to have had post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for many years and have failed with conventional treatments.

Doctors also excluded those with a history of psychosis or addiction.

In the trial, patients were offered two eight-hour psychotherapy sessions scheduled a few weeks apart, with 12 of them given a dose of ecstasy and eight a placebo.

Two months later, 10 of the 12 patients given ecstasy responded to the treatment, the researchers said.

In contrast, just two out of eight patients offered a placebo showed an improvement.

There were no adverse effects from the use of the drug in the study, which was funded by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

Study leader and psychiatrist Dr Michael Mithoefer said before ecstasy or MDMA, as it is clinically known, was used recreationally, hundreds of psychiatrists and psychotherapists around the world gave it to boost therapy.

Therapy sessions

He said: "Therapies for PTSD involve revisiting trauma in a therapeutic setting.

"But some reasons for it not being effective can be if the person is flooded with emotions they can't process or they have emotional 'numbing'.

"But MDMA seems to bring people into the optimal zone for therapy and seems to help them process the trauma and not be overwhelmed by feelings."

He said the next step was to start a planned trial in 40 military veterans before further studies in larger groups of patients.

The team are also following up patients to look at long-term effects and to find out if it increases the chance they will use the drug recreationally - but Dr Mithoefer said so far the results were reassuring.

If this were to be used more widely it would need special clinics equipped for long therapy sessions and overnight stays, he added.

Professor Simon Wessely, an expert in PTSD at King's College London and honorary consultant adviser in psychiatry for the British army, said due to the small size of the study it was difficult to draw any conclusions at this stage.

But he warned: "Given that substance abuse is associated with many mental health problems including PTSD, I would want to see a lot more data before recommending this."

7 Things to never do on Facebook

Over the last few years, Facebook has emerged as the most popular online destination. The world's no.1 social network is almost essentially a part of most Netizens virtual life.

Whether its a birthday, recent holiday or any other important occasion (at times not-so important one too), everything is shared on social networks these days. It is also a medium to get in touch with friends, express your views on various happenings and solicit support for any cause or issue.

However, there are things that we should never be doing on Facebook. ConsumerReports.org recently listed 7 things that are a complete no-no on Facebook.

1. The first thing that one should never have in Facebook is a weak password. With so much of your personal information at stake it is essential to have a strong password. Avoid names or words that can be found in a dictionary.
2. Another thing that you should never do on Facebook is give your full date of birth in your profile. Your complete date of birth is just what identity thieves may require to potentially gain access to your bank or credit card account.
   In case you have already done it, here's how to edit the info: Go to your profile page and click on the Info tab, then on Edit Information. Under the Basic Information section, choose to show only the month and day or no birthday at all.
3. It is imperative to restrict access for almost everything on Facebook. It is critical to provide restricted access to your personal info (including religious views and family information) and photos to only your family and friends. Also, avoid giving contact information like phone number and address.
4. Another complete `no-no' on Facebook is to give your child's name in a caption. Also, don't use your kid's name in photo tags. In case someone else has tagged your kid, ask them to remove it.
5. This again can be dangerous and is akin to putting `no one's home' signboard on your door. Wait till you are back home to share details about your wonderful holiday. Also, be always vague about your trip dates.
6. It's easy to find details about anyone these days, courtesy Search engines. Make sure you don't reveal yourself to everyone through these Search engines.
   
   To make sure strangers can't access your page, go to the Search section on Facebook's privacy controls and select Only Friends for Facebook search results. Also, make sure that the box for public search results is not checked.
7. Facebook has limited its membership to ages 13 and above. However, children younger than this can do it, as there is no foolproof way on the site to detect someone's age.
   
   In case your youngone or younger sibling is on Facebook, become their online friend. This can be one of the best way to superwise them. You can also use your e-mail address as the contact for their account so that you receive their notifications.
   
   Similarly, a child who posts the comment "Dad will be home soon, I need to get back to finish my homework" every day at the same time may inadvertently revealing too much about the parents' regular comings and goings.

The selfless and the selfish

For any human change, evolution or transformation to take place, elements of awareness and purity are required. They act as springboards for transcending our innate tendencies. In their absence, the good in us is overpowered by evil, leading to self-destruction. A story by Manoj Das talks about what happens when a village community becomes greedy. Even greed, it seems, is sustainable so long as purity co-exists, but once it exits, there is no hope.

• In the courtyard of each household kin a village is the sacred yajnakund where the ancient fire rite is earnestly performed. One day a Brahmin discovers a piece of gold in his kund. His wife informs him that a bull had entered their courtyard while she was sweeping it. Since she was chewing a betel-leaf and it became imperative to shout off the bull, she spat into the kund so she could frighten away the intruder. The Brahmin is outraged at the pollution of a sacred site but his hands are already rubbing the piece of gold which shines brighter with the rub! He protests but his wife snatches the gold from him with a laugh, spitting another mouthful into the kund! The next day she appears before him in a silk sari and the promise of a pair of silk dhotis for him. Soon their humble hut gives way to a fine building, a large number of cows and servants.
• The neighbours are envious. The wife who spat into the kund shares her secret with a young woman: “Who is endowed with my merit? I spit and there grows gold!” Soon the young woman too is bedecked in a silk sari and jewellery. The secret spreads and soon, gold emerges in every yajnakund - in all except one.
• A village teacher remains true to his swadharma of using the yajnakund only for worship. His wife implores him to allow her to spit betel-leaf into the kund but he resists. Unable to live in poverty in the midst of such opulence, she suggests they move to their daughter’s serene hamlet at the edge of a forest. He reluctantly agrees despite knowing it would prove disastrous. As they walk away they hear a commotion behind them. The village goes up in flames, each house torched by the fire of quarrel and division. Says the teacher tearfully: “This is the catastrophe I foresaw. Wealth earned without toil bred hatred. So long as even one yajnakund remained pure, order prevailed. But with our departure, the village lost all right to peace.”
• The yajnakund symbolises divine presence and selfless service. By polluting it we give in to greed, compromise morals and adulate material prosperity. The original strength of simplicity and piety inspired by service to the divine is eroded so insidiously by materialism that a single spark is enough to destroy this weak superstructure. If purity and awareness are undermined or neglected, not only is the macrocosm of community destroyed but the microcosm of the individual psyche is destroyed as well.
• Says Kabir in the Guru Granth Sahib: Kabir, pleasant is the saint’s humble hut, but the village of the wicked is a burning oven – May that palace be set on fire where Hari’s Name is not invoked!

7 habits for healthy skin

Wondering what you can do to nurture healthy, vibrant skin from the inside out? Tackle stress! Here are seven habits, which if you practice regularly can lead to great looking skin. Then, watch every inch of you and especially your face start to look younger, less stressed, more alive. Each step chips away at the non-stop pressure and tension that can age you by six years or more.

1. Practice deep breathing Shift your body's balance of oxygen versus carbon dioxide in favour of energizing, stress-squashing oxygen by doing slow, controlled breathing exercises. How often? Aim for twice a day. Why do it? When you focus on your breathing, you're not focusing on anything else. That mental shift helps remove stressors, bringing you to a deeper level of consciousness, a place where you can put things into perspective.
2. Get active Release the repressed anxiety trapped inside you by putting your body in motion for 30 minutes or more. How often? Do something, anything, every day, because exercise only tames stress for a maximum of 24 hours. So to reap the most benefits, you need to do it daily. If you prefer, tuck 10-minute pockets of activity into your day – at lunch, after dinner, right after you get up and the house is still quiet. Find ways to sneak fitness into your schedule. Why do it? Staying active boosts circulation, which delivers more nutrients to cells and skin. It also increases lung capacity, so you can take in more oxygen; lifts your spirits and sense of wellbeing; and fights age-related diseases. And, for many, it's the ultimate stress reducer.
3. Beat the foods that beat you Reduce the allure of sugary, fatty foods, which are as bad for your skin as they are for the rest of you, by eating more lean protein: fish, eggs, poultry, low-fat dairy foods, and even walnuts. Also, try to be more aware of what you reach for - and how much you consume - when you're stressed. Get some pointers on mindful eating. How often? All day, but especially early on morning protein helps curb afternoon cravings. Why do it? Protein is key to avoiding mood swings and energy dips. It helps you maintain a healthy blood sugar balance, which in turn keeps certain hormones (including insulin) in check. Bumping up your protein intake also gives you more energy and fights hunger pangs, which can play games with your moods.
4. Focus on the good things Pick up a notebook you particularly like, and at the end of each day, make a list of things for which you are truly grateful. Or write down three things that went well, and why. How often? Nightly, as part of your winding-down routine. Why do it? Keeping a journal that records the good things in life helps shift your focus to what you're doing right, and that can put the brakes on the stressful negative chatter that often goes on in your head.
5. Stretch out your sleep Make it a goal to sleep as many hours as you need to feel alive and productive the next day - all day. How often? Every night. Why do it? Sleep is free cosmetic medicine, pure and simple. It is what beauticians and doctors both agree on. Nothing exacerbates stress and etches in lines like exhaustion.
6. Take a time-out For most of us, life is so hyperscheduled and speedy that we never do absolutely nothing. It's rare to set aside time to simply be – no agenda, no demands, no plan. Find a comfortable, quiet spot to sit for 10 to 15 minutes every day, stop all your hustling and bustling . . . and simply, by yourself, be still. How often? Try for once a day. Why do it? Slowing down for a little while helps create a sense of spaciousness in your life, a break in the non-stop whirl that can open the door to new perceptions, new solutions, new possibilities. It gives your brain, your psyche, your whole being a break. Like one long, peaceful sigh.
7. Cuddle or have sex Enjoy a little intimacy. How often? At least once a week. Why do it? All kinds of age-defying, beauty-promoting events happen during sex as three seductive hormones spill out of the brain: endorphin, a natural opiate, which contributes to that delicious high; prolactin, which gives you that relaxing, tension-zapping ahhhhhhh; and soothing oxytocin, which promotes feelings of affection and triggers a nurturing instinct.

Pornistan? Pak tops world in 'sex' searches

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan — the land of the pure — has notched up a rather unenviable first place, for porn searches per person across the world, according to Google search trends. According to a Fox News report, Pakistan is "top dog in searches for 'horse sex', since 2004, 'donkey sex' since 2007, 'rape pictures' and 'rape sex' since 2004, 'child sex' between 2004 and 2007 and since 2009, 'animal sex' since 2004 and 'dog sex' since 2005". The country also tops or has topped in searches under the categories of sex, camel sex, rape video, child sex video and some other unprintables. The Pakistani embassy did not reply to a request for an interview, the report said. So far, Pakistan has banned 17 websites for offensive or blasphemous material and is monitoring seven others (including Google, Yahoo, YouTube and Amazon).

HTC, RIM and Nokia Challenge Apple’s Antenna Claims

Apple claimed at its press conference Friday that virtually every competing smartphone faces the same antenna challenges as the iPhone 4, but three of its competitors — HTC, RIM and Nokia — have since stood up and challenged that claim.Apple used as an example the RIM BlackBerry Bold 9700, saying that holding it a certain way will cause signal degradation just as with the iPhone 4, but RIM’s Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis were quoted by CrackBerryfrom the following statement:
Apple’s attempt to draw RIM into Apple’s self-made debacle is unacceptable. Apple’s claims about RIM products appear to be deliberate attempts to distort the public’s understanding of an antenna design issue and to deflect attention from Apple’s difficult situation. RIM is a global leader in antenna design and has been successfully designing industry-leading wireless data products with efficient and effective radio performance for over 20 years. During that time, RIM has avoided designs like the one Apple used in the iPhone 4 and instead has used innovative designs which reduce the risk for dropped calls, especially in areas of lower coverage. One thing is for certain, RIM’s customers don’t need to use a case for their BlackBerry smartphone to maintain proper connectivity. Apple clearly made certain design decisions and it should take responsibility for these decisions rather than trying to draw RIM and others into a situation that relates specifically to Apple.
Nokia jumped into the fray too, bragging that it was the pioneer of internal antenna technology, and claiming that it has this all figured out while Apple is just playing the blame game for its foolish design decisions. Here’s its statement.
Antenna design is a complex subject and has been a core competence at Nokia for decades, across hundreds of phone models. Nokia was the pioneer in internal antennas; the Nokia 8810, launched in 1998, was the first commercial phone with this feature.
Nokia has invested thousands of man hours in studying human behavior, including how people hold their phones for calls, music playing, web browsing and so on. As you would expect from a company focused on connecting people, we prioritize antenna performance over physical design if they are ever in conflict.
In general, antenna performance of a mobile device/phone may be affected with a tight grip, depending on how the device is held. That’s why Nokia designs our phones to ensure acceptable performance in all real life cases, for example when the phone is held in either hand. Nokia has invested thousands of man hours in studying how people hold their phones and allows for this in designs, for example by having antennas both at the top and bottom of the phone and by careful selection of materials and their use in the mechanical design.
Finally, HTC — whose Droid Eris was shown by Apple to have the worst signal problems of all during Steve Jobs’ presentation on Friday — decided against a lengthy statement and tried to let the numbers speak for themselves, telling Pocket-lint that only 0.016% of its Droid Eris buyers have called to complain about signal problems. Apple was saying with pride that 0.055% of its customers did the same about the iPhone 4.
Apple’s people surely must have anticipated that they would face a backlash from their competitors when they chose for their press conference the angle that other smartphone companies have the same problems they do, but Apple hasn’t fired back just yet. It may not; Apple’s best interest is to see this story die out in the press as soon as possible.

Allure Energy Announces a Thermostat That Knows When You’re Coming Home

Allure Energy announced another twist on the idea. The company connects your thermostat to a BlackBerry or iPhone app that tracks how far you are from home and adjusts your thermostat accordingly. Think of it as a location-based service for interacting with your thermostat.

When you leave in the morning, the system calibrates your home’s thermostat so you don’t waste energy while you’re away. Likewise, it senses when you’re on your way back, returning the temperature to your perfect degree of cozy.

“We are doing for home energy management what TiVo did for the VCR,” CEO Kevin Imes said in a statement. The technology could attract those who find programming their thermostat too much of a challenge or hassle. The company says the system could increase energy savings by up to 30%.

Nature’s recourse

How plants and animals fight back when deals go sour
Nature has a shifty side. Bees cheat flowers. Flowers cheat bees. Fish cheat other fish, and so on. The more biologists look, the more skulduggery turns up.

In this sense, cheating means pretty much what it does among people, says evolutionary biologist Toby Kiers of VU University Amsterdam: One party exploits another, taking more than its fair share or happily reaping benefits without paying the costs. “There is always that one person that orders the most expensive meal on the menu and then insists on splitting the bill evenly,” Kiers says.

Diners in nature don’t always mind their manners, either. A bee that bites through a flower wall for a long, sweet drink of nectar but doesn’t reciprocate by moving pollen, for instance, has cheated the plant. Such nectar snatches violate an evolutionarily ancient arrangement of trading food for pollination.

No outraged tablemates crack down on freeloaders in the wild. Yet, Kiers says, “Nature has its own tools.” These safeguards help keep pollinators pollinating and many other vital, two-partner biological processes humming along.

Theorists have long predicted that such anti-exploitation measures would have evolved. Now a burst of studies are revealing how real organisms cope with cheating. Most dramatic are the lethal punishments enacted by otherwise harmless-looking partners. “Plants can be brutal,” Kiers notes. Other creatures deliver sanctions that aren’t so harsh, or instead switch partners when things don’t work out. And in some cases of natural larceny, the cheating amounts to an annoyance that is easier to live with than to fight.

Odd couples
Species trade benefits all the time. Biologists have estimated that virtually every species on the planet participates in some win-win exchange, dubbed a mutualism, says Judith Bronstein of the University of Arizona in Tucson. And these mutualisms make life work.

Most organisms on Earth can’t get the nitrogen they need from the atmosphere. Instead many rely on the partnership between legume plants and bacteria that live in root nodules and create user-friendly nitrogen. And more than 80 percent of land plant species get extra phosphorus from the soil via fungi that also mingle their way into root tissues, getting sugar in the process.

Animals, including magazine readers, get nutrition assistance from gut-dwelling microbes with enhanced digestive powers. And many flowering plants, including three-fourths of leading food crops, need mobile members of the animal kingdom to act as go-betweens for sexual encounters. This flower-pollinator bond alone enhances human endeavors from the florist and landscaping industries to romance, poetry and the bold frontiers of hat design.

There’s a dark side, though. “Point out a mutualism to me, and I can point out a cheater,” Bronstein says.

Cheating looks, at least in some sense, like a winning strategy. Not paying the full cost gives an exploiter more resources to put into making cheater babies. Over generations these freeloaders might expand and take over, destroying the partnership. Yet a lot of mutualisms seem to be doing just fine, thank you. So what effect the cheaters have is an open question.

“The big thing in the last few years has been a wave of support for how sanctions and other enforcement mechanisms can stabilize cooperation,” says Stu West of the University of Oxford in England. Some of the restraints found so far are Wild West straightforward: The cheater gets taken out.

Greedy pollinators

For an Asian tree, a no-nonsense strategy for dealing with cheaters means aborting some flowers, Kiers and colleagues report in the March Ecology Letters.

Goblet-shaped, green female flowers and more flattened male ones burst out in masses on the Glochidion acuminatum tree. The blooms are tiny, though, each flower barely as large as a rice grain, and Kiers says a casual observer can walk by a tree in full bloom without noticing. The pollinator is easy to miss too: a gray moth visiting only at night.

Science as a whole had missed this mutualism until a 2003 study by Makoto Kato of Kyoto University, who was a coauthor on the Ecology Letters paper. With extreme patience, Kato’s team discovered that female Epicephala moths transfer pollen from the male flowers to the female ones. Moths benefit by injecting eggs into the safe, nurturing innards of the female flower. Having an egg injected into a maturing flower reduces the number of seeds the flower can produce, but the attention from moths must be worth it, at least up to a point.

To explore the dynamics of the newfound mutualism, Kiers joined Japanese colleagues camping among World War II bunkers on Japan’s Amami-Ohshima Island. Sitting in the dark waiting for a gray moth might not thrill everyone, Kiers says, “but for a scientist studying mutualisms, spotting the moth is like seeing a Siberian tiger in the wild.”

The Glochidion trees shed a lot of their flowers before they mature into fruits, and Kiers and her colleagues analyzed the number of moth eggs found in the aborted flowers. Those cradling one egg weren’t more likely than egg-free flowers to hit the ground, but blooms with two or three moth eggs grew progressively more likely to be dropped.
Since flower drop dooms any moth developing inside, the trees seem to be punishing moths that fail to search out untouched flowers and thus impose too much of a burden, Kiers and her colleagues propose.

This scenario echoes the smackdown that yucca plants can give unsatisfactory moths. Described in 1994, this response was the first clear-cut case of punishment in a mutualism. Yuccas depend on specialized moths for pollen delivery and offer those moths floral cradles. And yuccas tend to abort flowers that get overburdened with eggs (like the Asian trees) or that are neglected by pollinators, according to Olle Pellmyr, now at the University of Idaho in Moscow, and his colleagues. Although not closely related botanically, the Asian trees and the yuccas face similar risks in their mutualisms and have converged on similar punishments.

In fig trees, lethal punishments appear worthwhile. Pollinators of more punitive fig species seem to be better behaved than pollinators partnering with laxer figs, says Allen Herre of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute’s station on Barro Colorado Island in Panama.

Like yuccas and the Asian trees, figs trade infant protection for pollen delivery. Each of the more than 700 known fig species partners with just a few species of tiny, highly specialized wasps. The female wasps wriggle into closed pouches holding the trees’ flowers and lay eggs there. The figs face the usual downside of these day-care deals: Raising baby pollinators means the plants produce fewer seeds of their own.

Herre’s colleague, Charlotte Jandér, now at Cornell University, collected several thousand fig wasps near the Panama Canal and checked them for pollen. In four fig species, wasps preparing to leave their childhood home usually rummage through the flowers and pack pollen to go. But on occasion, from about 0.3 percent to 5 percent of the time, depending on species, the wasps shirk the task and fail to deliver pollen, Jandér and Herre report in the May 22 issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

They also assessed the ferocity of the partner trees’ punishments by coaxing pollen-free wasps into the flower pouches to see what happened. Tree species varied in how readily they aborted fruit (and thus killed the young wasps) when the insects didn’t live up to their duties. For fig species that slammed nonpollinator wasps with tough punishments, “you find very assiduous, meticulous, hardworking wasps,” Herre says. For laxer fig species, “that’s where you find more lazy, cheater, ne’er-do-well wasps.”

Fig trees are no angels either. Herre points out that almost half the known fig species have evolved a pollination system that abuses partner wasps by luring them into specialized female-only flower pouches that accept pollen but kill the wasps’ young. Herre says wasps don’t yet seem to have evolved a way to punish the plants.

Tough beans

Beans don’t go so far as to sacrifice their own flowers to punish a cheater — still, a legume is not be trifled with.

From soybeans to sweet peas to flamboyant tropical trees, the world’s legumes negotiate intricate mutualisms with nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Recruited from the soil, rhizobial bacteria reside in custom-built nubbins of root tissue where the plant feeds them carbohydrates. Once in the new quarters, bacteria start using their unusual enzymes to crack the strong bonds of paired nitrogen atoms, thus supplying the plant with nitrogen in the more usable form of ammonia.

To see what a plant might do to slacker bacteria that don’t pay their rent, Kiers and her colleagues forced the bacteria to cheat on command. Using air-tight containment areas, the researchers isolated individual root nodules of a single plant inside their own atmospheres. When Kiers filled a nodule’s zone with a largely argon atmosphere, the bacteria in the nodule couldn’t get atmospheric nitrogen as a raw material. It wasn’t their fault, but they failed in their obligations.

The plants retaliated by changing nodule permeability, cutting back on the bacteria’s oxygen supplies. The sudden oxygen reduction halved the rhizobial bacteria’s usual rate of reproduction.

Cheating rhizobia, known in agriculture, have now been found in the wild.

Joel L. Sachs of the University of California, Riverside and his colleagues collected and analyzed root bacteria from four Lotus legumes growing in Bodega Marine Reserve and Sonoma Coast State Park. One rhizobial strain the team collected, belonging to the nitrogen-fixing genus Bradyrhizobium, proved to be a miscreant that induced lab plants to grow nodules but then just sat inside providing nothing in exchange. In lab tests, the freeloading strain reproduced more abundantly than the dutiful strains, Sachs and his colleagues report in the May Journal of Evolutionary Biology. Lotus in the wild might find it handy to dial down oxygen on goof-offs.

Outright punishments aren’t the only choice for coping with scam artists, though. Some mutualists appear to reward good behavior, an approach James Bever of Indiana University in Bloomington calls preferential allocation.

Spare the rod

Bever works with a large group of fungi called arbuscular mycorrhizae. When these fungi encounter a plant root of a species they can work with, they poke through the outer wall of root cells and branch into treelike tangles. The tangles press against the inner cell membrane, which bulges around them. “It’s like sticking your hand into a balloon,” Bever says. The fungi feed on plant carbohydrates and pass along phosphorus from the soil.

In lab tests of wild garlic plants with roots divided in two parts, roots partnered with more productive fungi carried extra carbohydrates to the star performers. The other root bunch, forced to associate with a less productive fungal strain, carried less, thus shorting the slackers, Bever’s team reported in 2009. What actually happens in real soil is the next big question.

Bever doesn’t classify this as punishment, though, because the fungi don’t appear to suffer much. They can draw the needed nutrients from other plant partners or survive on their own. “If you don’t give a child a lollipop, is that punishment?” he asks. He doesn’t think so. Of course, the child might disagree.

Large reef fish that rely on smaller ones for grooming use a mix of mild punishments and tools of the marketplace to get good service. On reefs, big fish itchy with parasites swim to spots frequented by small specialist cleaner fish. As the bigger fish hovers, the cleaners work the client over, nipping off the parasites.

Experiments offering cleaner fish a choice of snacks have established that the cleaners will eat the parasites but prefer the clients’ protective mucus coating. Should a cleaner cheatand nip off a bit of mucus, though, the client darts after the small fish in a snapping, menacing chase.

After all the plant violence, a mere chase may not seem like much of a threat, but clients often have another recourse: They can take their business elsewhere. And a paper in the January 8 Science found that cleaners themselves occasionally get upset. The team argues that males will chase a female cocleaner at a family-run station if she nips a client’s mucus, thus threatening mutual interests by scaring away business.

Meanwhile, bobtail squid swimming around the Hawaiian Islands may follow the same advice that fretting mothers deliver to teens: Be careful in screening partners before intimate involvement.

The squid Euprymna scolopes hunts at night and allows luminous strains of Vibrio fischeri bacteria to colonize an organ in its body cavity, creating an internal night-light. With bacteria at work, the soft glow disguises the squid’s silhouette from creatures swimming below. To move in, however, a bacterium needs to respond just right to chemical signals from the squid. “A series of locks and keys” is how Margaret McFall-Ngai of the University of Wisconsin–Madison describes the back-and-forth of biochemical interactions. In 2009 a team of researchers identified a gene form that is found in the strains of light-producing bacteria that colonize squid but not in strains that colonize fish.

If a lackluster strain does make it in, the squid have a back-up punishment plan, McFall-Ngai notes. They deny the bacteria sustenance.

Just deal with it

Some mutualists may not punish or goad substandard partners at all, treating them just as a nuisance to live with. Consider that flower that gets drained of nectar by a bee that doesn’t pollinate. “A bunch of flowers get damaged — oops! You make more,” says ecologist Rebecca E. Irwin of Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H.

So far, scientists haven’t found clear-cut evidence of punishment for potential pollinators that grab the nectar and run. That’s true even though species such as the flower Irwin studies, the scarlet gilia, produce fewer seeds after burglaries. This situation suggests that the cheaters aren’t destroying the partnership.

Bronstein also has studied plant-pollinator mutualisms and says they have left her cautious about automatically treating cheaters as horrible menaces that demand a response. In the jimsonweed that she studies, hawkmoths deliver pollen in exchange for nectar, but also lay eggs on the plants. If given the chance, larvae will quickly gnaw the plants’ leaves down to nubs.

Instead of preventing caterpillar gorging, the plant seems to excel in recovering from damage. New leaves sprout quickly, and life goes on for the jimsonweed.

Though new research has uncovered cases where cheaters pay heavy tolls, Bronstein says she would like to know how widespread those outcomes are. A new generation of models suggest that it is not hard to come up with conditions that allow cheater species to persist without annihilating the mutualism.

“The idea that cheaters are incredibly costly is too general an idea,” she says. Maybe the threat of cheating to the future of mutualisms is just exaggerated.

Cheaters would still have an effect, Bronstein says. They might change the evolutionary path of their teammates, but they might not end the partnership. Among critters, as among people, then, unfair behavior may amount to an annoying, persistent part of life.

10 Signs It’s Time to Leave Your Job

Do you get into the office without a plan of action for the day? Are you not being rewarded for your efforts? Does your boss often pull you down and embarrass you in front of colleagues?
If any or all of these ring true, it might be time to shake things up.
Here are 10 signs that could indicate that it’s time for you to move on – either from your current job function or from your organization – to other adventures.

1. Social networking but not working
Are Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter taking up more of your working day than preparing that PowerPoint presentation? If your company doesn’t allow access to these sites, perhaps your energies are focused on finding proxy sites which allow you to access sites that have been blocked by your company.
Or, do you simply dread coming to office and wait for the day to end quickly?
If this happens some days a week, then maybe you simply need a holiday. “But if one spends more than a month populating Farmville on Facebook, then yes, it’s stagnation and you need to move on,” says Purvi Sheth, chief executive officer of Mumbai management consulting firm Shilpusti Consultants.

2. Been there, done that
If your job has become so routine or monotonous that you can do most of it without thinking much, what are you doing in it? Essentially, you are not learning much or growing in that role, so you won’t be able to stay motivated for long. “Careers are not ponds, they are streams; they have got to be going somewhere from somewhere,” says Dony Kuriakose, director of Delhi-based recruitment firm Edge Executive Search Pvt. Ltd. “If you’re not moving, you’re dead in the water.”
Remember that if you have become too complacent and start taking the company for granted, your employer will soon recognize that, putting your role in jeopardy.

3. Not challenged enough
This is related to the point above. But if you feel that your organization is not giving you the right exposure or a challenging enough position, you could end up becoming very frustrated. “Take the initiative of engaging with (your) employer and…ask for more responsibilities,” says Pankaj Arora, managing director of Protiviti Consulting Pvt. Ltd, a business consulting and audit firm. If that doesn’t work, look for challenges elsewhere within or outside your organization.

4. Unmet goals
You want to become a team leader or a business head but your employer is moving you around into different departments without really promoting you. “It is time for you to move on when you feel your career objectives are not being met or fulfilled by your employer,” says Ms. Sheth.

5. Too big for your shoes
You were good at your first job, so you were promoted to the next level and the next level and so on. But now you have reached a position which is too much for you to handle. This is popularly referred to as the Peter Principle which states that in a hierarchy, employees rise to a level of their incompetence.
Either you need to re-skill and reinvent yourself pretty quickly to survive in that role or you need to move into another position which is a better fit for you.

6. Closed to change
Today’s organizations are nimble on their feet and are often changing their processes or businesses to meet delivery and cost pressures. If you can’t handle that change because you are too set in your ways, you could end up getting left behind. Or, maybe you don’t agree with your organization’s changes at a philosophical or an ethical level. “There are certain reasons why you work at a place and there are certain things that enthuse you,” says Mr. Kuriakose. “If those core issues change and you suddenly find that you’re working for a place that you wouldn’t have joined” it might be time to rethink.

7. Politics over mechanics
Every organization has politics and it’s smart to keep on top of major changes as well as the movers and shakers of your organization. But if your professional relationships at work have become so entangled and complicated that they are keeping you from your work, that’s a problem. Don’t let politics become more important to you than the mechanics of your job.

8. You’ve been overlooked — again
Are your batch mates from school and college more successful than you are? Or is your company promoting people with less experience and fewer achievements above you? Figure out why that is happening. If they’re working harder and are smarter than you, then consider adding to whatever skills are keeping you from that next job. But if your company is overlooking you, then it might be time to go where you get more recognition.

9. Don’t want your boss’s job?
We typically envy our bosses not only for their higher salaries but also for the responsibility and authority they command. But if you don’t aspire to be in your boss’s position at some time in the future, then it’s time to look around and reconsider your career plans. You can’t stay in your current position forever. Not everyone has to be the top dog, but a career path that promises advancement and satisfaction is a good road to be on.

10. Evil thoughts about your boss?
Ok, so all of us have some evil thoughts about our bosses every now and then. That’s normal. If you hate him or her as a person, deal with it. But if your professional relationship is troubled, then you have a problem. “You have to work with all kinds of people,” says Mr. Kuriakose. However, a boss who is always pulling you down, and maybe embarrassing you in front of colleagues, could be harmful for your morale and progress. Time for some introspection and perhaps an exit strategy.

The incredible shrinking solar cell

THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING SOLAR CELL Researchers are creating miniature photovoltaic cells that promise to make solar power cheaper and more versatile. Randy Montoya/Sandia
The next generation of solar cells will be small. About the size of lint. But the anticipated impact: That’s huge.

Some of these emerging electricity-generating cells could be embedded in windows without obscuring the view. Engineers envision incorporating slightly larger ones into resins that would be molded onto the tops of cars or maybe the roofs of buildings. One team of materials scientists is developing microcells that could be rubber-stamped by the millions onto a yard of fabric. When such cells shrink in size — but not efficiency — it becomes hard to imagine what they couldn’t electrify.

“The idea is to develop ubiquitous solar power,” says Greg Nielson of Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. Foldable and moldable modules crammed full of photovoltaic cells could directly power devices or recharge batteries. “You can imagine putting them onto every surface,” he says. “Your cell phone, laptop, backpack, tent — whatever.”

The U.S. Department of Energy is funding more than a dozen labs to investigate photovoltaic physics “at the nanoscale,” notes Linda Horton, who works in the agency’s Office of Science in Washington, D.C. “Our goal,” she says, “is to understand and improve at a very fundamental level the process by which energy from sunlight is translated into electrical energy.”

Concentrate on this

The real trick to creating useful and affordable lilliputian solar cells is not just shrinking their overall size, but cutting the amount of silicon (or another costly semiconductor) that is needed for them to deliver a watt of power.


ENLARGE
THE SMALL PRINT University of Illinois solar microcells can be stamped onto a flexible surface. J. Rogers
Most photovoltaic devices today are crafted from rigid wafers of costly silicon. At 20 micrometers thick, Sandia’s little cells are less than 10 percent as chunky as the ones used in conventional photo­voltaic devices. “And because ours are not just thin, but small laterally, we can do interesting tricks with them optically,” Nielson says. For instance, his group has begun studding minute refractive lenses into glass or plastic plates. Each lens concentrates sunlight onto a solar cell, nearly as small as a pinpoint, that sits directly below.

Silicon is needed only at the focal point of each lens, further diminishing the required quantity to about 1 percent of what’s needed per unit of light-collecting area with commercial photovoltaics. “So silicon is no longer the dominant cost, but a negligible one,” Nielson says.

His group grows thin, pure crystalline silicon, then etch-cuts each wafer into a mass of separate hexagons anywhere from 250 micrometers to 10 millimeters in diameter. “We call them glitter,” says Sandia’s Murat Okandan, and they do sparkle in hues ranging from gold and green to dark purple. Each batch yields uniform and remarkably rugged cells. “We can easily pick them up with a tweezers, and they don’t break,” the electrical engineer says.

The Sandia program, which began in early 2008, is already turning out proto type cells with an energy conversion efficiency of about 15 percent. “And we anticipate getting over 20 percent,” Nielson says. That wouldn’t be far from the best commercial solar cells today, which sport efficiencies somewhat more than 25 percent, Okandan adds.

The small print

At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, John Rogers works with even thinner silicon — 10 to 15 micro meters thick — because when it’s slim enough it flexes like a strand of hair. Although he’s testing silicon even thinner than that, the material presents special challenges, he notes, “because even at 10 to 15 micro meters the silicon won’t absorb all of the incident light.” Much passes through.


ENLARGE
OUTDOOR CARPETCaltech scientists have created a solar collector that bounces sunlight through a forest of silicon semiconductor wires until most of the energy is absorbed. Michael Kelzenberg/Caltech, adapted by E. Feliciano
By backing the cells with a reflective material, however, photons that initially evaded the silicon will bounce back for a second chance at collection. “We found that 15 micrometers is just about the right thickness for that kind of double-pass configuration,” Rogers says. “It will collect about 90 percent of the light.” And the efficiency of these cells is already good, he says, on the order of 12 percent.

The Illinois microcells also rely on concentrators to focus sunlight. Another key to keeping cell costs low, Rogers contends, will be avoiding a need to “pick and place” each cell individually within a module of perhaps legions of others, which is what the integrated circuit industry does today. In the February Energy & Environmental Science, Rogers’ team describes a way to simultaneously lift and transfer thousands of microcells.

After building a block of pure crystalline silicon, the researchers etch out thousands of tiny cells from its surface by cutting around the sides of each one and even underneath. After the etching process is finished, the only thing holding the cells to the starting silicon are tiny anchors of material left at either end of each cell.

The scientists then place a soft piece of slightly tacky rubber onto the batch of cells and press down just hard enough to fracture the anchors. When they lift this rubber pad up, the freed cells come with it.

“We can lift up thousands of these cells at a time and then simply rubber-stamp them down onto a surface” coated with a thin-film adhesive, Rogers says. “Our throughputs correspond to millions of devices per hour — much, much higher than can be achieved with even the most sophisticated tools for doing that [by] pick-and-place.”

Sparse pile

Caltech scientists have upended the silicon elements in their microcells and jettisoned the concentrator. In the April Nature Materials, the team describes a prototype that resembles a sparse carpet of tiny fibers that stretch up toward the light. In the latest designs the fibers are 100 micrometers long and 1 or 2 percent as wide.

Some photons entering the carpet will immediately hit a semi­conductor fiber. Many more will miss the wires, which cover only 1 to 5 percent of the carpet’s footprint. But by making the wires effectively long and the carpet’s bottom reflective, photons not initially collected will ricochet repeatedly within the carpet until the silicon collects most of them, explains team leader Harry Atwater.

To protect and hold the fibers, the Caltech scientists pour a liquid akin to clear bathroom caulk (a polymer that solidifies into a pliable plastic) to fill space separating the carpet’s sparse pile.

“We can now peel this composite array of wires and polymer off the starting substrate just as if it were a piece of Scotch tape,” Atwater says. The solar cell — this wire-studded polymer — “has the mechanical properties of a plastic bag,” he notes. “So you can roll it or bend it and the wires won’t break.”

By maximizing photon ricochets within the carpet, the applied physicist explains, “you’re getting the same light absorption as you would from a sheet that’s 100 percent silicon,” but using only 1 percent as much of the pricey material.

Unlike systems that rely on concentrators, which don’t work well on cloudy days, “this kind of cell has equally good absorption for light entering at oblique angles — like when the sun is low in the sky or when light is scattered by clouds.”

Prospects

Although none of the emerging designs are quite ready for prime time, several groups think that products based on their innovations could enter the marketplace in as little as three to five years.

“Right now the solar industry is kind of in a race to bring costs down to $1 per watt,” Nielson says. “From our cost models, it looks like we can get well below that with high-volume production.” But that’s a ways off, he concedes, since his team has only just begun networking individual glitter cells to make coordinated modules.

Atwater has conducted all of his experiments with silicon carpets a few square centimeters in size. “The technology looks promising,” he says, “but you have to ask: Will everything translate when you scale up to very large areas?”